“Be strong, be proud, be Jewish” may feel good, but bumper sticker maxims will not protect the Jewish community from accelerating assaults on Jews and Israel.

Since the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, antisemitism has exploded across

America and the Western world with a speed and ferocity that has left Jewish leaders dizzy and disoriented. On elite campuses, Jewish students are harassed, shoved, and attacked. In major cities, synagogues are vandalized and Jewish-owned businesses boycotted. In Congress, elected officials openly traffic in blood libels while their colleagues look away. And, in the streets, mobs chant for the elimination of the Jewish state with a passion that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

Yes, Jews need to feel more Jewish, to bolster and expand Jewish religious education and to practice and experience the power of feeling like a people.

But these are not substitutes for political intelligence. The assault on us has turned political. Public figures, including elected officials and candidates for office, are gaining support (and clicks, thus funds) for expressing anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish messages.

The chronic ailment from which Jewish community is suffering is a catastrophic shortage of intelligent political strategy. Jewish leaders are playing defense. But their enemies are fighting an offensive political ground war — demographic, financial, institutional, political, and psychological. Jewish organizations are issuing statements while their opponents are organizing precincts. They are convening dialogue sessions while their enemies are electing city council members, school board members, and state legislators.

What is needed extends beyond Jewish education and pride seminars. What is needed is a political strategy that is aggressive and unapologetic, one that is built on two pillars.

First: Go on the Rhetorical Offense

We must stop absorbing accusations and start throwing them back at our defamers.

There’s a method to the defamation campaign: every horror with which the Jews are falsely charged has actually been committed by Islamists and covered up by their anti-Zionist allies. When Jews are falsely accused of genocide, they should blast their assailants with photos and personal reports of the actual horrors driven by jihadist ideology. The Arab and Muslim world has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of black Africans, Kurds, Yazidis, and Christians — recently, and going back more than a millennium. Let the survivors talk and then amplify their message in social media, newsprint, and video.

The so-called “human rights activists” hide actual horrors on a scale that dwarfs anything in the Middle East conflict. We cannot allow them to conceal these truths behind the taboo of “Islamophobia.” The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Sudan, and Boko Haram have committed the exact crimes the Arab and Muslim world and its fellow travelers invent in order to smear Israel. Jews should expose their crimes front and center in the public eye.

When Israel is falsely accused of apartheid, we must bring forward escaped slaves from Mauritania, Sudan, Libya, and the Gulf states to speak the truth about rampant chattel slavery in the Arab world today.

When Jews are accused of colonialism, we must attack the false innocence of Arab Muslims whose true origins stem from armies that swept out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. And these armies did not spread Islam through the peaceful missionizing of a Saint Patrick; rather through conquering, Arabizing, and Islamizing vast swaths of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Balkans, genocidally exterminating tens of millions in the process. They have not stopped enslaving and slaughtering non-Arab peoples even today.

Why have Jewish leaders not told the truth about these matters? They operate under the illusion that the effective response to the genocide calumny is evidence of the precision of Israeli strikes in Gaza, that apartheid lies are effectively parried by pointing to Arabs voting in Israeli elections, and that absurd colonialism myths are demolished by explaining that half of Israeli citizens came from the Arab world and the other half were mainly penniless refugees from dozens of different countries. In other words, they think that facts and logic trump fabrications and distortions. But they don’t.

The second source of failure is fear of the label of “Islamophobia,” a concept invented to shield all Muslim history, belief, and practice from criticism.

The genius of the anti-Israel propaganda machine is that it keeps Jews permanently on defense, forever explaining, forever apologizing, forever proving a negative. The answer is to pivot and seize the moral high ground that is rightfully ours and force the accusers to answer for their own crimes.

Every campus “apartheid wall” should be met with an exhibition on slavery in Mauritania. Every BDS resolution should trigger a counter-resolution on jihad massacres in Nigeria. Every chant of “genocide” should be answered with the documented body counts from Sudan, where Muslim Brotherhood-backed Arab militias have slaughtered millions of black Africans, both Christian and Muslim, within living memory.

This is not mudslinging. It is truth-telling. And it is long overdue. If Jews had been telling the truth about their foes, enemy lies would be seen as attempts to evade responsibility for shocking and massive crimes. Had Jews set the moral framework from the start, cries about Palestinian suffering would be seen as a disingenuous tactic of diversion from a painful reckoning. Grass-roots Jewish groups, like the Chicago Jewish Alliance, train Jews across the country in rhetorical offense.

The Second Pillar: Build the Alliances That Actually Exist

We need to build real alliances, not the kind that involves courting people who have come to despise Jews and Israel.

For decades, Jewish leaders poured their political capital into progressive coalitions that have now abandoned them with breathtaking speed. The radical feminists, the labor unions, the LGBTQ organizations, the trans community, most of the social justice network chose the side of Hamas within days of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The lesson should be written in neon: these were never real allies. They were transactional relationships that only benefited the social justice warriors and collapsed the moment loyal Jews needed reciprocity.

The real allies have been largely ignored for years. Evangelical Christians and patriotic conservatives have stood with Israel consistently and without apology. Classical liberals and conservatives — the kind who still believe in Western civilization and are horrified by what is happening to it — are natural partners. Most Republicans have been overwhelmingly reliable on Israel and on antisemitism when it counts.

Beyond America’s borders, there is an even larger alliance waiting in the wings. Tens of millions of people today are prey to the same jihadist movement targeting Jews and Israel — such as African Christians from Nigeria and South Sudan — and now spreading and consuming Christians from many African nations. Jihadist violence is decimating Middle East Christian communities — Assyrians, Egyptian Copts, Lebanese Maronites, Syrian Greek Orthodox, and more. Since jihad does not tolerate any kind of infidel, victims also include Druze, Kurds, Alawites, Iranians, Amazigh Berbers, Yazidis, and millions of Hindus. All share a common enemy and a common interest in defeating jihadism. Tragically, they have been mostly ignored by a Jewish leadership class too blinkered by progressive ideology to see them.

The International Freedom Coalition, launched in March 2026, is an initiative that is building this global alliance — uniting the victims of jihadism from across the world into a common front.

Yes, let’s tell the Jewish community to find more ways to be strong. But let’s also tell Jews the truth: strength without strategy is a fool’s errand. The enemies of the Jewish people are organized, funded, and on the march. The response cannot be merely more solidarity rallies and calls for resilience.

It is time to fight — and to fight smart.

Charles Jacobs is president of the International Freedom Coalition. George Flesh is an independent political analyst.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)